"Whew!" said Woodhouse. "We"re in for trouble. Don"t you say a word--or Ollyett either! I"ll pay the fines and we"ll get it over as soon as possible. Where"s Pallant?"
"At the back of the court somewhere," said Ollyett. "I saw him slip in just now."
The fat man then took his seat on the Bench, of which he was chairman, and I gathered from a bystander that his name was Sir Thomas Ingell, Bart., M.P., of Ingell Park, Huckley. He began with an allocution pitched in a tone that would have justified revolt throughout empires.
Evidence, when the crowded little court did not drown it with applause, was given in the pauses of the address. They were all very proud of their Sir Thomas, and looked from him to us, wondering why we did not applaud too.
Taking its time from the chairman, the Bench rollicked with us for seventeen minutes. Sir Thomas explained that he was sick and tired of processions of cads of our type, who would be better employed breaking stones on the road than in frightening horses worth more than themselves or their ancestors. This was after it had been proved that Woodhouse"s man had turned on the horn purposely to annoy Sir Thomas, who happened to be riding by"! There were other remarks too--primitive enough,--but it was the unspeakable brutality of the tone, even more than the quality of the justice, or the laughter of the audience that stung our souls out of all reason. When we were dismissed--to the tune of twenty-three pounds, twelve shillings and sixpence--we waited for Pallant to join us, while we listened to the next case--one of driving without a licence.
Ollyett with an eye to his evening paper, had already taken very full notes of our own, but we did not wish to seem prejudiced.
"It"s all right," said the reporter of the local paper soothingly. "We never report Sir Thomas _in extenso_. Only the fines and charges."
"Oh, thank you," Ollyett replied, and I heard him ask who every one in court might be. The local reporter was very communicative.
The new victim, a large, flaxen-haired man in somewhat striking clothes, to which Sir Thomas, now thoroughly warmed, drew public attention, said that he had left his licence at home. Sir Thomas asked him if he expected the police to go to his home address at Jerusalem to find it for him; and the court roared. Nor did Sir Thomas approve of the man"s name, but insisted on calling him "Mr. Masquerader," and every time he did so, all his people shouted. Evidently this was their established _auto-da-fe_.
"He didn"t summons me--because I"m in the House, I suppose. I think I shall have to ask a Question," said Pallant, reappearing at the close of the case.
"I think _I_ shall have to give it a little publicity too," said Woodhouse. "We can"t have this kind of thing going on, you know." His face was set and quite white. Pallant"s, on the other hand, was black, and I know that my very stomach had turned with rage. Ollyett was dum.
"Well, let"s have lunch," Woodhouse said at last. "Then we can get away before the show breaks up."
We drew Ollyett from the arms of the local reporter, crossed the Market Square to the Red Lion and found Sir Thomas"s "Mr. Masquerader" just sitting down to beer, beef and pickles.
"Ah!" said he, in a large voice. "Companions in misfortune. Won"t you gentlemen join me?"
"Delighted," said Woodhouse. "What did you get?"
"I haven"t decided. It might make a good turn, but--the public aren"t educated up to it yet. It"s beyond "em. If it wasn"t, that red dub on the Bench would be worth fifty a week."
"Where?" said Woodhouse. The man looked at him with unaffected surprise.
"At any one of My places," he replied. "But perhaps you live here?"
"Good heavens!" cried young Ollyett suddenly. "You _are_ Masquerier, then? I thought you were!"
"Bat Masquerier." He let the words fall with the weight of an international ultimatum. "Yes, that"s all I am. But you have the advantage of me, gentlemen."
For the moment, while we were introducing ourselves, I was puzzled. Then I recalled prismatic music-hall posters--of enormous acreage--that had been the unnoticed background of my visits to London for years past.
Posters of men and women, singers, jongleurs, impersonators and audacities of every draped and undraped brand, all moved on and off in London and the Provinces by Bat Masquerier--with the long wedge-tailed flourish following the final "r."
"_I_ knew you at once," said Pallant, the trained M.P., and I promptly backed the lie. Woodhouse mumbled excuses. Bat Masquerier was not moved for or against us any more than the frontage of one of his own palaces.
"I always tell My people there"s a limit to the size of the lettering,"
he said. "Overdo that and the ret"na doesn"t take it in. Advertisin" is the most delicate of all the sciences."
"There"s one man in the world who is going to get a little of it if I live for the next twenty-four hours," said Woodhouse, and explained how this would come about.
Masquerier stared at him lengthily with gunmetal-blue eyes.
"You mean it?" he drawled; the voice was as magnetic as the look.
"_I_ do," said Ollyett. "That business of the horn alone ought to have him off the Bench in three months." Masquerier looked at him even longer than he had looked at Woodhouse.
"He told _me_," he said suddenly, "that my home-address was Jerusalem.
You heard that?"
"But it was the tone--the tone," Ollyett cried.
"You noticed that, too, did you?" said Masquerier. "That"s the artistic temperament. You can do a lot with it. And I"m Bat Masquerier," he went on. He dropped his chin in his fists and scowled straight in front of him.... "I made the Silhouettes--I made the Trefoil and the Jocunda. I made "Dal Benzaguen." Here Ollyett sat straight up, for in common with the youth of that year he worshipped Miss Vidal Benzaguen of the Trefoil immensely and unreservedly. ""_Is_ that a dressing-gown or an ulster you"re supposed to be wearing?" You heard _that_?... "And I suppose you hadn"t time to brush your hair either?" You heard _that_?... Now, you hear _me_!" His voice filled the coffee-room, then dropped to a whisper as dreadful as a surgeon"s before an operation. He spoke for several minutes. Pallant muttered "Hear! hear!" I saw Ollyett"s eye flash--it was to Ollyett that Masquerier addressed himself chiefly,--and Woodhouse leaned forward with joined hands.
"Are you _with_ me?" he went on, gathering us all up in one sweep of the arm. "When I begin a thing I see it through, gentlemen. What Bat can"t break, breaks him! But I haven"t struck that thing yet. This is no one-turn turn-it-down show. This is business to the dead finish. Are you with me, gentlemen? Good! Now, we"ll pool our a.s.sets. One London morning, and one provincial daily, didn"t you say? One weekly commercial ditto and one M.P."
"Not much use, I"m afraid," Pallant smirked.
"But privileged. _But_ privileged," he returned. "And we have also my little team--London, Blackburn, Liverpool, Leeds--I"ll tell you about Manchester later--and Me! Bat Masquerier." He breathed the name reverently into his tankard. "Gentlemen, when our combination has finished with Sir Thomas Ingell, Bart., M.P., and everything else that is his, Sodom and Gomorrah will be a winsome bit of Merrie England beside "em. I must go back to town now, but I trust you gentlemen will give me the pleasure of your company at dinner to-night at the Chop Suey--the Red Amber Room--and we"ll block out the scenario." He laid his hand on young Ollyett"s shoulder and added: "It"s your brains I want."
Then he left, in a good deal of astrachan collar and nickel-plated limousine, and the place felt less crowded.
We ordered our car a few minutes later. As Woodhouse, Ollyett and I were getting in, Sir Thomas Ingell, Bart., M.P., came out of the Hall of Justice across the square and mounted his horse. I have sometimes thought that if he had gone in silence he might even then have been saved, but as he settled himself in the saddle he caught sight of us and must needs shout: "Not off yet? You"d better get away and you"d better be careful." At that moment Pallant, who had been buying picture-postcards, came out of the inn, took Sir Thomas"s eye and very leisurely entered the car. It seemed to me that for one instant there was a shade of uneasiness on the baronet"s grey-whiskered face.
"I hope," said Woodhouse after several miles, "I hope he"s a widower."
"Yes," said Pallant. "For his poor, dear wife"s sake I hope that, very much indeed. I suppose he didn"t see me in Court. Oh, here"s the parish history of Huckley written by the Rector and here"s your share of the picture-postcards. Are we all dining with this Mr. Masquerier to-night?"
"Yes!" said we all.
If Woodhouse knew nothing of journalism, young Ollyett, who had graduated in a hard school, knew a good deal. Our halfpenny evening paper, which we will call _The Bun_ to distinguish her from her prosperous morning sister, _The Cake_, was not only diseased but corrupt. We found this out when a man brought us the prospectus of a new oil-field and demanded sub-leaders on its prosperity. Ollyett talked pure Brasenose to him for three minutes. Otherwise he spoke and wrote trade-English--a toothsome amalgam of Americanisms and epigrams. But though the slang changes the game never alters, and Ollyett and I and, in the end, some others enjoyed it immensely. It was weeks ere we could see the wood for the trees, but so soon as the staff realised that they had proprietors who backed them right or wrong, and specially when they were wrong (which is the sole secret of journalism), and that their fate did not hang on any pa.s.sing owner"s pa.s.sing mood, they did miracles.
But we did not neglect Huckley. As Ollyett said our first care was to create an "arresting atmosphere" round it. He used to visit the village of week-ends, on a motor-bicycle with a side-car; for which reason I left the actual place alone and dealt with it in the abstract. Yet it was I who drew first blood. Two inhabitants of Huckley wrote to contradict a small, quite solid paragraph in _The Bun_ that a hoopoe had been seen at Huckley and had, "of course, been shot by the local sportsmen." There was some heat in their letters, both of which we published. Our version of how the hoopoe got his crest from King Solomon was, I grieve to say, so inaccurate that the Rector himself--no sportsman as he pointed out, but a lover of accuracy--wrote to us to correct it. We gave his letter good s.p.a.ce and thanked him.
"This priest is going to be useful," said Ollyett. "He has the impartial mind. I shall vitalise him."
Forthwith he created M.L. Sigden, a recluse of refined tastes who in _The Bun_ demanded to know whether this Huckley-of-the-Hoopoe was the Hugly of his boyhood and whether, by any chance, the fell change of name had been wrought by collusion between a local magnate and the railway, in the mistaken interests of spurious refinement. "For I knew it and loved it with the maidens of my day--_eheu ab angulo!_--as Hugly," wrote M.L. Sigden from Oxf.
Though other papers scoffed, _The Bun_ was gravely sympathetic. Several people wrote to deny that Huckley had been changed at birth. Only the Rector--no philosopher as he pointed out, but a lover of accuracy--had his doubts, which he laid publicly before Mr. M.L. Sigden who suggested, through _The Bun_, that the little place might have begun life in Anglo-Saxon days as "Hogslea" or among the Normans as "Argile," on account of its much clay. The Rector had his own ideas too (he said it was mostly gravel), and M.L. Sigden had a fund of reminiscences. Oddly enough--which is seldom the case with free reading-matter--our subscribers rather relished the correspondence, and contemporaries quoted freely.
"The secret of power," said Ollyett, "is not the big stick. It"s the liftable stick." (This means the "arresting" quotation of six or seven lines.) "Did you see the _Spec._ had a middle on "Rural Tenacities" last week. That was all Huckley. I"m doing a "Mobiquity" on Huckley next week."
Our "Mobiquities" were Friday evening accounts of easy motor-bike-_c.u.m_-side-car trips round London, ill.u.s.trated (we could never get that machine to work properly) by smudgy maps. Ollyett wrote the stuff with a fervour and a delicacy which I always ascribed to the side-car. His account of Epping Forest, for instance, was simply young love with its soul at its lips. But his Huckley "Mobiquity" would have sickened a soap-boiler. It chemically combined loathsome familiarity, leering suggestion, slimy piety and rancid "social service" in one fuming compost that fairly lifted me off my feet.
"Yes," said he, after compliments. "It"s the most vital, arresting and dynamic bit of tump I"ve done up to date. _Non n.o.bis gloria!_ I met Sir Thomas Ingell in his own park. He talked to me again. He inspired most of it."
"Which? The "glutinous native drawl," or "the neglected adenoids of the village children"?" I demanded.
"Oh, no! That"s only to bring in the panel doctor. It"s the last flight we--I"m proudest of."
This dealt with "the crepuscular penumbra spreading her dim limbs over the boskage"; with "jolly rabbits"; with a herd of "gravid polled Angus"; and with the "arresting, gipsy-like face of their swart, scholarly owner--as well known at the Royal Agricultural Shows as that of our late King-Emperor."